Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Sunday April 30, 2006 @09:50AM
from the thats-pretty-funny dept.

slayer99 writes "I came across Explorer Destroyer yesterday, which is a project that aims to increase the market share of Firefox in a slightly more proactive way than is usual. They provide some code which you add to your front page which presents a banner to IE users urging them to switch to using Firefox. As a bonus, you can potentially make some money via Google's Firefox referral program."

this project's goal is not to get people using any better browser but Firefox.

O rly? "Your Mission: Get Under 50" in the article [explorerdestroyer.com] describes a stats page that tracks sites that have fewer than 50% page views from Microsoft Internet Explorer. The end is less IE; the means is more Firefox. If the goal were to advocate Firefox to replace Opera or Safari or Konqueror, the mission would be "Get Over 50".

This is the kind of zealotism that each day drives me farther from Firefox and more into the arms of Opera...

I've been using Opera for a long while but lately I've given Firefox a try... It's nice and all, but Opera has some neat details that Firefox lacks. A very simple and frivolous example: I can move my tabs from the top to any other the side! Yeah! Oh, Firefox has an extension for it? Is it the one that breaks with every new Firefox version? You get my drift...

Anyways, I see less and less advantages in Firefox when compared to Opera. So Firefox is opensource... well, I couldn't care less. It's the same if someone said "hey, don't drink Coke, drink Shomke, because we know the recipy and we can all change it!". I don't give a flying rat's ass about code and source code, I, as a end user, just want things to work a certain way. And Opera does work that way, and does let me change things around out of the box. In Firefox, we need a stupid "extensions" just to clip a toenail in the interface.

"Firefox can't do this" "Hey, here's an extension" "Firefox can't do that" "Here's another extension". Prety quickly you will have a handfull of extensions, that might or might not break with the next Firefox version...

Heck, I'll give you another example! There is an extension to (gasp!) minimize Firefox to the system tray, right next to the clock. In one of the last Firefox updates, that extension stoped working at my computer at work. Yes, FF is updated to the latest version and so is that extension, but everytime I use both together, FF just displays a big, empty window, with *nothing* to click or any menus. And guess what! At my home computer, I have the *same* version of both and it runs fine! And don't go blaming it on Windows, because I'm using the same Windows XP in both computers. Oh and in Opera, the hotkey for that specific funtion is Ctrl-H. No extensions, no breakups...

So, about this whole "holy-war" agains IE... I'm just sitting and watching, waiting for the inevitable moment when this will blow on the face of the zealots... remember folks, FUD works both ways, and if you spread FUD to suport your product of choice, sooner or later it will bite you in the ass.

I have to say this is the classic example of someone trying to do things the right way "by the booK", and ends up doing everything wrong. A few points:

+ Sending a XHTML DOCTYPE to IE actually breaks it by putting IE in "legacy CSS" mode. Send a HTML4 DOCTYPE and it's not perfect, but margin and em will work at least.

+ No browser has any sort of XHTML support except for Mozilla Firefox. The rest just fake it as HTML4, except for IE which correctly doesn't accept a MIME type for a document it can't handle correctly. So IE & FF are correct, Safari and Opera are broken.

But here's the fun part: even though Firefox correctly accepts XHTML, it disables progressive rendering and makes your site load much slower. Why would you want to do that?

So, while making XHTML compliant pages is admirable, realistically you want to serve HTML4 to current browsers.

Those who only develop for IE are almost always working under contract.

Imagine, for example, that you're a retailer called "The Void". Your internal IT department can't do much, as you decided long ago that it is best to outsource all development. You approach your IT services vendor and say:

Then, once you go live, you get all these complaints from customers. WHAT is going on? You hire an expert to find out. It turns out that no one at "The Void" was smart enough to actually understand the ramifications of the contract. The site, as built, only works with IE.

It is easy and inexpensive to design and build for all modern browsers. It's just that many IT contractors like to milk money out of their customers. Building for IE alone is an easy way to milk money.

Except that, since browsers ignore tags they don't know, the Firefox referral is going to pop up in every non-IE browser on the planet. After all, from the browsers point of view, you've just included some unknown tags around the text, presumably to apply some "fancy" formatting to it; since it doesn't know what you're trying to do, it just ignores the tags and shows the text as-is.

Now, if there was some tag like <IEonly text="your Firefox referral here"/>, that would work, since the text would be an attribute of the unkown tag. But simply adding nonsense tags around a piece of text is not going to make it disappear from browsers that don't know the tags.

No, <!-- is the beginning of an HTML comment, and --> is the end of one. IE sees the comment, then sees the conditional code and knows to include it (if it matches the right version). Other browsers simply see it as an HTML comment and don't show it.

No, it's not retarded... for anyone who follows his advice, and clicks the Google Adsense advert and signs up to Google Adsense, then he (Holmes Wilson, according to whois) gets $100 from Google for a succesful referal.
That's a pretty smart way of fooling people into clicking the link. Underhand, but smart.